ORLANDO, FLA.- The Mennello Museum of American Art is presenting Sally Michel: Abstracting Tonalism from September 20, 2024 to January 12, 2025. This exhibition is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in over 23 years and her first in Florida, a location where she sought both colorful inspiration and secluded respite in the state's natural beauty.

Sally Michel: Abstracting Tonalism brings forth a fresh and innovative consideration of Michel's legacy outlining a new, non-linear narrative of paintings created between 1930s and the 1990s that address Michel’s distinctive use of color, abstraction, and form. Through their own personal moments of familiar critique, painting side by side for years, Michel and her husband Milton Avery developed a style that has been described as the bridge between Realism and Avant-Garde – The Avery Style. The style describes how Michel incorporated still-recognizable imagery (genre scenes like landscapes, still lives, or portraits) simplified through abstraction and constructed of interconnected fields of bold, emotive color.

Beyond the similarity of the family’s style, Michel’s paintings reflect her own interests in the everyday, landscape, and human figure as well as her exposure to the blossoming New York City art world and artists of the European Avant-Garde – Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, and Pablo Picasso. Looking toward more traditional art forms, Michel found inspiration in the Tonalism movement wherein artists were concerned with conveying how a landscape felt in one's spirit – a reality beyond appearances, for which the exhibition is titled. Michel’s artistic practice ensured that the mood and atmosphere of her own personal moments could be conveyed and emotionally felt by anyone, at any time, and therefore understood universally.

Sally Michel: Abstracting Tonalism presents the first museum retrospective exhibition in over 20 years. The themes of Michel’s oeuvre between the 1930s – 1990s, ranged from studied nudes to intimate, figurative depictions of her closest relationships to rare, captivating landscapes of her travels in the United States and abroad.

This exhibition considers 34 paintings and 21 works on paper unfolding across seven decades that impart a lyrical expression of the everyday and share Michel’s respect for humans, animals, and deep admiration for nature and its corresponding ever-changing light. A force in abstraction, figuration, tonalism, and color, Michel's extraordinary production is a rich, varied, and compelling story that commands a more inclusive consideration that did not manifest in her lifetime.

Michel and Avery both devotedly depicted the Florida landscape motivated by their artist residencies and later vacations to the state. The couples’ first stay was in Central Florida in 1949 at the Research Studio for Painters and Writers (now Art and History Museums Maitland). During the winters of 1949-1950 and 1950-1951. Both artists sketched profusely and experimented with monotypes during this time – of which, one of Michel’s is on display. They thoroughly enjoyed taking inspiration from the natural world in Central Florida, still undeveloped around them and included many trips to the east coast beaches, scenes which feature prominently throughout the exhibition.

Curated by Katherine Page, Curator of Art & Education, Sally Michel: Abstracting Tonalism establishes a curatorial framework for reconsidering the painterly genius of Michel. The narrative begins with how Michel began painting seriously after finishing high school in Brooklyn but chose to work as an illustrator for Macy’s and The New York Times Magazine to support her family for over three decades while she encouraged her husband, artist Milton Avery to pursue success in the New York art world.

Katherine Page, Curator, Art and Education states “I am beyond grateful to have worked with the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation and D. Wigmore Fine Art Inc. along with private lenders over the past three years to bring together an exhibition checklist that spans Sally Michel’s entire artistic career. From Michel’s New York Times pen and ink illustrations that supported her family during and beyond the Great Depression in New York City to her earliest gouache and watercolor studies painted while on long vacations, to her penultimate oil paintings, which demonstrate Michel’s mature style and progressive interest in portraying the essence of a moment captured first in watercolor studies and translated to the canvas though glazes and washes of tactility built atop the painting surface. Michel’s artistic practice was one of patience and passion as she stood aside to afford her husband the limelight. She sketched her ideas regularly and analyzed her compositions and techniques with peers to find a method of portraying a feeling beyond words building a meaningful body of work that reflects universal moments of enjoyment.”

Shannon Fitzgerald, Executive Director states “The museum is delighted to present a comprehensive survey of Michel’s artwork that contributes to a greater appreciation and visibly for her achievements as an artist that thoughtfully recognizes a more robust place in the male dominated narrative in art history- particularly in Michel’s generation. We are proud to generate new scholarship and provide a generous context for such a remarkable artist, who like many female artists of the time, did not receive critical contexts during their lifetime. This is a remarkable endeavor, exhibition, and publication, made possible by the significant work of our curator Katherine Page and with the kind support of the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; it is an honor to share such fruits with our Central Florida audiences for the first time.

Accompanying this exhibition is a scholarly catalog featuring two new essays: one by Katherine Page exploring Michel's abstract language and tonalism in relationship to figuration and a new essay by Eleanor Heartney, who provides a critical feminist lens to understand Michel’s contributions to the art world that helps secure her place in art history. Heartney, is a renowned critic and a long-time contributing editor of Art in America and the author of numerous books, including Art & Today, Postmodernism, and After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art.